Le Pont des Arts (2004)
Directed by Eugène Green

Film Review

Director Eugène Green's third feature is a haunting meditation on the connection between art and life that somehow manages to be both alluring and jarring, an idiosyncratic film-poem that abounds with mystique and mischief.   Developing the exaggerated formalism of his debut feature, Toutes les nuits (2001) (which won the Prix Louis Delluc for first film), Green has his actors delivering all of their lines in a flat, emotionless register (à la Bresson), sometimes directly into the camera, and adopts a rigid style of mise-en-scène that would seem to be more at home in the theatre than on a cinema screen.  The self-conscious stylisation and formal structuring of the film into well-defined acts gives it a distinctly Nouvelle Vague feel, which is greatly assisted by Adrien Michaux's more than vague resemblance to Jean-Pierre Léaud.  Green's main claim to fame is that he led a revival of French baroque theatre technique in the late 1970s, so it is no accident that the word that best encapsulates his unique style of cinema is 'baroque'.

Le Pont des Arts was clearly never conceived as a crowdpleaser but it risks alienating even committed art house audiences with its overblown pretensions, cockeyed attempts at humour and surfeit of borrowed (or semi-borrowed) techniques.  In a cast of supremely talented actors, Olivier Gourmet comes off worst and appears frankly ridiculous in a scene in which he acts out a scene from Racine's Phèdre as a prelude to seducing a prospective protégé.  This histrionic equivalent of a sadistic outbreak of piles is very nearly surpassed by Denis Podalydès's truly cringe-worthy impersonation of a psychotically cruel chorus master, complete with a phoney English accident which requires him to preface every utterance with the exclamation "Oh!", because (apparently) this is the way the English intelligentsia speak.  Oh.

Mercifully, it is only when the film tries to be funny that it becomes unbearable.  For the most part, Le Pont des Arts is an eerily beguiling piece that successfully wraps the aesthetics of baroque theatre around a very modern play that sees various disparate individuals struggling to comprehend the meaning of existence.  Those (few) scenes where the film comes dangerously close to the abyss are forgiven when it takes on a more serious hue and draws us into the fractured realities of the two main protagonists, who are played to perfection by Adrien Michaux and Natacha Régnier.  Régnier has never appeared more beautiful, nor more fragile, than she does here and has an almost ethereal presence that befits her between-worlds character.  Her character transcends life and death, and becomes a kind of soul in transit, a perpetual resonance on the fabric of creation, like the Monteverdi madrigal (Le Lamento della ninfa) she sings with such feeling.  With his fay persona and aura of gentle nihilism, Michaux makes the perfect Orpheus to Régnier's Eurydice in what is soon revealed to be a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth.  The closing sequence, in which Michaux and Régnier encounter one another on the Parisian bridge of the film's title, has such power and poignancy that it at once elevates the work to a higher plain and helps to redeem the film's earlier detours towards the intolerably grotesque.

Film Synopsis

Christine and Pascal are two arts students at the university of Paris in the late 1970s.  Their harmonious relationship falls apart when Christine begins nagging Pascal for not taking his studies seriously.  Sarah, a young singer with a baroque ensemble, lives with her partner, Manuel, a computer programmer. Noticing how sensitive Sarah is to criticism, Manuel tries to console her when she falls foul of her tyrannical chorus master, an opinionated fiend known as The Unnameable.  Dismissed from the ensemble, Sarah decides to take her own life.  Pascal is also driven to suicide but when he hears a recording of Sarah's voice he is pulled back from the brink...